Reminds me of typing "webos20090606" or "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" into the webOS "Just Type" universal search bar, which revealed a hidden developer mode switch that allowed sideloading of apps.
Sometimes when I see emoji now I look back and remember doing this on my old iPod Touch back when I was young and thinking I was so cool. It's funny to remember a time before emoji was ubiquitous when you had to go out of your way to use it.
It’s very easy for people, especially younger people, to look at this with a 2026 understanding of the ubiquity of emoji and scoff at how ludicrous Apple was being. Things were very different. Drive-by Apple decriers will attribute anything possible to Steve Jobs’ vague “desire to control”. The reality is there were things he would obsess over and plenty he would let pass him by.
Emoji only made its way into Unicode in the 2010s. The past and present of text encoding, especially text message encoding, was/is a huge mess. I wouldn’t be running in guns blazing if I were them.
The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.
The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
It's the standard Apple "We will decide what you can run on your own computer, not you" paternalism that we have come to know and expect, and that they have perfected over the decades.
The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.
And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.
Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
> Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.
I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.
Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!
I still remember the very first time I saw an emoji -- just an old-school dumb phone, and my friend sent me a message with an emoji, which the phone, amazingly, was able to display. I had no idea such a capability even existed, and wondered for a second if I was dreaming.
It's been so long I had almost forgotten about this... there was also at some point a 3rd party camera app which had a secret setting (activated by entering some URL into iOS Safari), enabling the use of the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. When Apple found out, they banned the app from the App Store. Not much later, the iPhone's built-in camera app got that feature which we all take for granted now.
Emoji originally came from Docomo phones in Japan around 1999. (Or I think those were the first ones actually called "emoji"; some other earlier devices had similar character sets.)
Decorative emojis (the stuff AI loves to add to bullet lists) don't do much. On the other hand I'd say emojis at the start/end of a sentence are as meaningful as emoticons or /s or any other Internet shorthand for conveying intent.
Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is everything. So emojis being imprecise is not a unique problem.
And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.
Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.
I believe they do. When people talk in person, there is a lot of non verbal communication that give context to their words (smiles, shrugs, side glances, etc). Even when it's just people talking over the phone, the way they pronounce words carries information (it's a lot easier to tell if someone is being sarcastic if you hear their voice, for example). So, emojis are useful for providing that missing context.
That's a great point, but I am skeptical that emojis adequately carry the affect of nonverbal communication. I believe you make a case for sending audio/video messages alongside the text.
The same way. For me the proper use of emojis is in reactions, to cut down on brief responses that cause clutter and undesirable notifications. I am less welcoming of them in the middle of a message, where they don't serve that purpose.
Probably because they weren't well supported in the West at the time and Apple didn't want people sending messages and emails from their iPhone with missing glyphs. It's one of those things you need a consensus for, both the sender and recipient have to support it. It's not something like iMessage where Apple only has to worry about their own ecosystem.
https://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Getting_started
The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.
Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.
Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!
Emoji originally came from Docomo phones in Japan around 1999. (Or I think those were the first ones actually called "emoji"; some other earlier devices had similar character sets.)
^_^
Ah the halcyon days of feelin' pompous for using random squigglies to convey emotion.
Still remember being scandalized by the flip table emoticon using characters I couldn't find on my keyboard. So jealous I had to ...
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
well, not that actually. just paste, I guess.
And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.
Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.